Species and systematics
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Denver Post is reporting that the US Army wants to use a major fossil site for bombing practice. The Picket Wire Canyonlands, in the Commanche National Grasslands, is included in a series of maps the Army has drawn up for increasing its ordinance ranges.
The landscape of southeast Colorado also crawls with history, but time may be running out on public access to the past as Fort Carson considers acquiring the land for war training.
This secluded valley is home to one of North America's richest dinosaurs finds - more than 1,300 individual tracks; 35 sites have yielded bones.
"The great…
evolvingthoughts | May 28, 2007
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has made a Web 2.0 site of botanical works, the Botanicus Digital Library:
Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As always I just love it when someone hands me facsimile copies of ancient publications (although they have some more recent stuff too), all under a Creative Commons license.
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Do you remember a series of posts I did on microbial species? Well it evolved into a paper that has just been accepted, with some very constructive criticisms by a reviewer, for History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. I thank all my commenters for suggestions and help.
This paper had a rough history - it was supposed to be included in another journal's special edition but the editor and reviewers seemed not to get the point of it (and, to be fair, a lot of the early drafts were a bit sloppy). But in the revision process I worked out some clearer ideas than I started with, and I am now…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
Since Linnaeus' birthday is tomorrow, my time, and I stuffed up the last post, here's another little treat for you:
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1770, from 1761 Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus)
There are many myths about Linnaeus that are due to the properties, real or imagined, of the system named after him (Cain 1994; Koerner 1999; Larson 1968; Winsor 2006). In fact the so-called "Natural System" as it came to be known, was on Linnaeus' own view an artificial one (Cain 1995), and it did not spring forth fully formed from his brow, no matter how much he saw himself as a "second Adam". His…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
The Smithsonian, it is being reported, toned down an exhibit on the Arctic for fear of reprisals in funding levels from the Bush Administration. While there is no evidence that the Administration directly threatened the Institute, the atmosphere of "do science our way" is so palpable that even the premier scientific institution of the United States would dumb down its knowledge... but apparently it is not the first time the Smithsonian has done this, according to the article. I guess that comes from being a political toy.
In a more general and direct case of attacking science, the…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have essences, only that there are diagnostic descriptions or definitions that allow naturalists to identify species in the field or in museum collections. But I'm no Linnaean scholar, so if anyone has information to the contrary, let me know.
Not much is known about the early education of poor Swedish…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007"King Phillip Came Over From German Soil" - anyone remember that? It's a mnemonic, designed to make it easier to recall the Linnean ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Unfortunately, ranks change (Phylum and Family were inserted in the 1870s at an international meeting in Paris), and a new one has been proposed (and hotly debated): Domain. So what should the mnemonic now be? "Dumb King Phillip..."?
There are a host of mnemonics for biology (and even more for medicine). Jason Grossman, sometime commentator and fulltime good guy, sent me this suggestion:
I needed a…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007
In reading Jack Smart's excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Identity Theory, I was again struck by the role that the distinction between type and token plays in philosophy of mind. This distinction was originally made by Charles Sanders Peirce back in (if memory serves) the 1870s (he also distinguished "tone", but that hasn't traveled well). I think it may even apply to biological taxonomy and the species problem.
Smart says that a type of mental state may, on some accounts, have different tokens. I won't get into this here (I'm a full blown identity theorist, and if folk…
evolvingthoughts | May 10, 2007
All I did was get my beloved Powerbook 12" serviced, and what happens? The Interlub goes wild with great stuff. Or was it always, and I only noticed because I was unable to blog? So, here is a rough and ready roundup of interesting things.
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I had a wonderful time last night talking to the Philosophy Students Association about Dawkins' The God Delusion. You, my loyal readers, already know my views on this, so I won't rehearse them here. But Paul made a comment I had to think about overnight. He does that. It was basically about religious…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
The BBC is reporting that the parchment manuscript that had a palimpsest of Archimedes' treatise on floating bodies, also turns out to have two other lost works: a text by Hyperides, a 4thC BCE politician of Athens, but much more excitingly, a 3rdC CE commentary on Aristotle's Categories, in which modern logic was first defined (along with other works by Aristotle), by Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Some, for instance Calamus, are critical of the Christian monks that, in the 13thC CE, scraped these works off the parchment to reuse it for a prayer book. But this is possibly due to the fact that…
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2007
Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
Yesterday was Willi Hennig's birthday. Hennig invented cladistics (though he called it "phylogenetic systematics"), which is the foundation for all modern taxonomy. Frölich Geburtstag, Willi!
Via Paleoblog.
Oops, my mistake. Philosophers are not always good at math.
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
Yesterday, a commenter asked why I said this and what I meant by it:
All species at a given time have exactly the same evolutionary duration, and on average, probably the same number of ancestral species, as their nearest relatives.
Consider this diagram:
This is an evolutionary tree, or rather part of it since we probably do not know all the branches and taxa that actually occurred in it, for four extant species. The concestor c for A and D is shown by the lowest circle, for A and B and C at the next highest circle, and for B and C at the top circle. The number of previous species to…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
I sometimes wonder why anyone ever tried to make a living in Australia. Although it is the least wet continent (unless it is an island) on Earth apart from the Antarctic, where they don't grow a lot, Australians have always used water as if they were still living in Britain, or some other well watered place.
We grow rice and cotton, for gods' sakes, in some of the most arid land there is. We water lawns, and use massive amounts of water in industries and domestically. We now use five times as much water as we did back in the 1980s, in dishwashers, showers, swimming pools and toilets. So…
evolvingthoughts | April 18, 2007
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear. The notion of an ancestor is one of them. But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution.
Ergo...
The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram.
That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles.
The first wrinkle is…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
For some reason I am finding it harder to get published as I go on, not easier. I suspect I am getting dumber as I age. However, I just had a paper published in Biology and Philosophy:
Wilkins, John S. 2007. The dimensions, modes and definitions of species and speciation. Biology and Philosophy 22 (2):247 - 266.Download here for subscribers.
evolvingthoughts | March 29, 2007
In the very first page to the Origin, Darwin writes:
WHEN on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.
Who is this greatest philosopher, and what did he mean by that phrase?
I was moved to follow this up when I was challenged on my claim in a forum that…
evolvingthoughts | March 26, 2007
Well, it's a nice idea, but they seem to be a bit confused, on the one hand getting the kids to sing about Linnaean ranks, and on the other about five kingdoms, Animals, Plants, Fungi, Archebacteria and Eubacteria. Still, nice to see taxonomy being taught to primary kids, even if the song is excruciatingly cute.
Hat tip to atlas(t)
evolvingthoughts | March 26, 2007
As you all may know, I wrote a series of blog entries on microbial species concepts back when I first moved over to Seed, which had previously been on my older blog [links at end]. This then became a talk and later a paper, now in review. My argument was that there was a principle by which we could tell if microbes were a single species or not, depending on how regularly it exchanged its genetic material.
Now the American Academy of Microbiology has caught up with me <insert smiley here>...
A report by the AAM entitled Reconciling Microbial Systematics and Genomics raises the…